FOLLOWING calls for the application of appropriate sanction on Oba Oluwadare Adesina Adepoju, the dethroned Deji of Akure, who had led a lynch squad to the house of his estranged wife, Bolanle, only to find himself in an unseemly street melee, a roforofo fight in which he was reportedly flung into a gutter, traditional beads and all, by his own ‘subjects’ who came to the rescue of the woman, Segun Mimiko, the Governor of Ondo State, had warned that he would not be stampeded into deposing the Kabiyesi.

For a graduate of the Abacha School of Torture who by self-avowal had been through the valley of the shadow of death, it was both natural and not asking too much to expect that he would be different. True Obasanjo has not been shown to manage a killer squad, but his military past seems to have clung to him so much that he abhorred opposition, especially where such opposition displayed sufficient know-how that called into question Baba’s know-it-all tendencies.

Just before I got down to writing this, I heard a news report that Adamu Waziri, the Minister in charge of Police Affairs, had advised 139 police officers demoted alongside Malam Nuhu Ribadu to apply to have their demotion reverted.

This is the task for President Goodluck Jonathan who is well-advised to resist the attempt in certain quarters to see him as the candidate of the Niger-Delta. No, Jonathan is not and cannot be the ‘messiah’ of the Niger-Delta. Neither time nor history will favour such impertinence on his part.

Without taking away from his personal merits, President Jonathan is in every terms a child of Providence. His rise as a relatively obscure deputy governor of a small state like Bayelsa, to the position of Vice President and, then, President within a space of six, seven years is in every sense the ‘Lord’s doing’.